The members of the Rai Supervision of the opposition resign. It also leaves the majority

Mass resignation from Rai Supervision. There president Barbara Floridia leaves office. With her, all the members of the opposition in the bicameral body, according to what parliamentary sources from the minority forces report. “As members of the opposition forces of the Rai Parliamentary Supervisory Commissionwe have all tendered our resignations with immediate effect. It is a necessary political act, a consequence of the paralysis that has prevented the Commission from carrying out its role of guarantee for months, due to divisions within the majority and a management that has effectively emptied its functions. A choice made after repeated appeals, which remained unheard, to the Presidents of the Chambers, Ignazio La Russa and Lorenzo Fontanaand despite the warning of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to the full functioning of Parliament’s guarantee bodies”. We read this in a note from the opposition.

The members of the majority also leave

“We too, like the opposition, resign from the former Rai Supervisory Commission occupied, seized and exploited irresponsibly from the left. This has cynically exploited the law on RAI, which provides for a 2/3 majority to elect the President, which we have been trying to change in recent months”. This was declared by the centre-right members of the RAI Supervisory Commission.

“It is anomalous, in fact, that the President of Rai cannot be elected by majority after a certain number of votes, an eventuality which is envisaged even for the office of President of the Republic. And the opposition, in fact, have shamefully exploited this lawthus preventing Rai from having a President despite having been designated some time ago by the Rai Board of Directors. We are faced with a shameful pantomime staged by the oppositions who have the desire to continue to monopolize the public service, after having lost the government of the nation by will of the Italians. And it is precisely the greed of left-wing seats that produced the stalemate in the Commission. As far as we are concerned, we are available to create a new Commission with a new President, to quickly give a president to Rai and resume the cycle of hearings that the resignation of President Floridia and the members of the opposition in the Supervisory Authority interrupted. This staging will not prevent Rai from finally returning to being free and pluralist”, they conclude.

The reasons for the opposition’s resignation

“The previews of the new schedules confirm the progressive decline of the public service: ratings and credibility are declining, pluralism and merit are reduced, expensive external contracts are increasing and the Media Freedom Act is being disregarded. We believe that the Commission is no longer in a position to exercise its institutional supervisory function. Remaining within it would mean abdicating the function of democratic control and endorsing an increasingly partisan use of the public service. Our resignations ask us to give back to the citizens a free, autonomous and truly pluralist”, add the opposition group leaders in the parliamentary commission for the general direction and supervision of radio and television services in the note Stefano Grazianofor the Democratic Party, Dario Carotenuto, for the 5 Star Movement, Angelo Bonelli e Giuseppe De Cristofaro, for the Greens and Left Alliance e Maria Elena Boschi, for Italia Viva.

Leaving the Commission is “a very painful decision”

In the letter of resignation from the Rai Supervisory Commission, the opposition group leaders of the bicameral body explain that “the decision, very painful due to the respect for the parliamentary culture that animates us, it was taken as an extreme ratio in the face of the point of no return in which the parliamentary commission finds itself today. The continuing paralysis of activities due to reasons entirely internal to the parliamentary political forces of the majority has effectively debased the role of the Commission and dealt a further very severe blow to the Rai company. Paralysis due to an act of arrogance by the majority itself with the indication of a President in spite of the regulatory framework and every form of common sense. A forcing that triggered the ‘political seizure’ of the Commission, preventing its normal functioning. The reasons that pushed us to this act of rupture are serious and structural. We’ve been recording for years a constant decline in ratings and an objective loss of credibility of Rai. In four years the company has lost its cultural and informational centrality in the country, the public has moved away from a flattened and self-referential offering, as demonstrated by the ratings of the flagship networks, starting with the news. This is the most evident fact of the failure of an editorial project that never took off”, continue the opposition representatives. “We have witnessed the humiliation of staff and merit. A system based on loyalty and ideological belonging has been imposed, flaunted as a source of pride, transforming it into a ‘method’ of corporate governance”.

The accusations of the members of the Rai Commission

“The professional, editorial and programming choices were made to the detriment of the merit, skills and professional history of the men and women of Rai”, we read further. “Programs appealing to the public have been canceled without explanation and a Rai network has been targeted exclusively for ideological reasons. Unfortunately, Rai has progressively given up its institutional task of making the country grow culturally, investigative journalism has been marginalized, the in-depth programs emptied, the spaces for plural discussion reduced. From a regulatory point of view, the situation has further worsened with the precise will of the government and the majority forces of do not adopt the Media Freedom Act to protect the independence and pluralism of information. A regulatory vacuum that allowed the company to be occupied with political and ‘proprietary’ management. A systematic dismantling of Rai’s public function accompanied by the desire to erase, even symbolically, its history as in the case of the sale of the properties. All these elements are pieces of a single, dangerous puzzle. They have only one common thread: the idea of ​​Rai being ‘pertinent’ to a majority, and not as a common good for citizens. In these conditions we believe it is no longer possible to remain in the Commission as the very word ‘supervision’ has disappeared. An emptied body, incapable of exercising its role of guarantee, has in fact become complicit in the decline of the largest cultural company in the country. This is why we resign. We do this so that the causes of the Rai crisis can emerge forcefully and to ensure that this company can return to the center of public debate for its value and function. There is no longer room for supervision that is no longer put in a position to be able to monitor to the detriment of the ordinary functioning of a parliamentary body and of the very quality of democracy”, they conclude.

The words of Barbara Floridia

“Why today? Because the limit is full. Because there is a year to go until the elections and an active and vigilant Commission on the public service is needed, because there is not even the decency to hide what is happening. I am not willing to spend the last year of this legislature helplessly witnessing requests for hearings from the opposition which are systematically rejected by the majority to prevent them from asking questions, demanding answers, holding those who are managing Rai to account.” Barbara Floridia thus explains, in a long post on Facebook, her resignation as president of the Rai Supervisory Commission“delivered today to the presidents of the Senate and the House.”

“Do not consider this resignation a surrender. It is not. I consider it an act of freedom and denunciation. Of freedom, because I consider it a warning to defend an important right: that of citizens to be freely informed and not manipulated. Of denunciation – continues the senator M5s – because I consider what happened to the Supervisory Commission to be a dangerous precedent that we cannot underestimate. An institutional wound that affects democracy and institutions, but which we will have the duty and responsibility to heal.”